People Divided on Published Map of Gun Holders

02 Jan, 2013

By Polly Kreisman

The New York Times Wednesday published a piece about its readers’ opinions on the Journal News’ (Westchester) decision to publish a map showing names and addresses of pistol permit holders (We published the story last week)

“When a newspaper in Westchester County, N.Y., published a map online last month showing the names and addresses of local pistol permit holders, a flood of nationwide criticism (and a counter-flood of support) ensued. Many gun owners objected to the information being published, though it is publicly available, and now, officials in Putnam County, N.Y., are refusing to release pistol-permit records to the paper, The Journal News.

A post here on City Room about the controversy drew its own outpouring of more than 1,000 comments, with our readers close to evenly split between the pro and con camps. (We did not do a full tally, but we looked at the first 100 and the most recent 100 comments that were easily classifiable and found that 52 percent supported The Journal News’s publication of the map and 48 percent opposed it.)